Privacy Policy: How We Act as Freelancers for Ad Agencies

Staying True to Ourselves While Staying True to Others

One of the major benefits of UpperNinety is its willingness to act as freelancers for ad agencies. A financial benefit for us, to be sure, but a creative benefit for ad agencies. In a sense, we’re like a creative staffing organization. If you need copy, design, art direction, ideation, branding or anything else for which creatives are responsible, we can get you a single creative or a team. We’ve worked with agencies across North Carolina, as well as agencies in LA, Seattle, Chicago, Calgary and more. But a question we’ve received on occasion asks how another creative firm such as UpperNinety can be trusted with the information they’ll learn while working with another agency. We often work like freelancers, but we also have our own clients, so it’s fair to worry about us trying to poach your clients or misuse information we learn while working for you. And, let’s be honest: The inner workings, client confidentiality and business information of an ad agency requires privacy. So what makes us worthy of your trust?

We Are Not an Agency of Record for Anyone
The very reason UpperNinety can be trusted with your clients is because we don’t want them. Not that they aren’t clients we don’t want to work with (far from it!), but we exist in different business models. As an agency, you are an agency of record for the the clients with which you ask us to help. We, on the other hand, are not an agency of record to anyone. We have many repeat clients, but our model is solely project-based when it comes to our own clients. A business that requires an agency of record isn’t our type of client.

We like it this way. This pushes us harder in all work we do, whether it be our own clients or other agencies, because our success depends on people wanting us to work for them again. If we don’t do our best, or we don’t live up to agency expectations, our new clients and agency partners stop calling. Everything we do is in service of the business or agency paying us, with the expectation that they’ll want to do it again, and we’re not about to jeopardize a winning formula to take another agency’s client for our own.

Client & Company information is Your Most Important Asset. Our Reputation is Ours.
As a small advertising collective, UpperNinety relies on its reputation for confidentiality as much as our reputation for solid work. This applies to your current clients, whoever you may be pitching, and whatever changes may be occurring in your agency while we’re there with you. If your client is developing a groundbreaking product or service, that needs to be a secret until it is launched. If you’re pitching a new client, and a rival agency is doing the same, the very knowledge that you’re working on said pitch is confidential, and should remain that way. Any client or organizational changes your agency is experiencing while we’re there must stay within your own walls.

For example, we recently partnered with our founder’s former agency, The Variable, for two full months. And during that time, we learned that … Nope. Just kidding. We’re not going to be the people that prove we can keep a secret by telling a secret. Besides, there’s nothing to tell. Or maybe there is. You wouldn’t know either way by talking to us! The easy point is: We signed a confidentiality agreement, and we are legally required to abide by it. But the greater, more important point is: We don’t have to sign a confidentiality agreement to know that we are morally and ethically required by our own company values to respect your agency’s — and its clients’ — privacy. That’s just how we roll. Hell, we even contacted our friends at The Variable to make sure this portion of the post was cool with them.

The Trust of Freelancers Built into an Advertising Collective
Agencies generally don’t fret about the trustworthiness of full-time freelancers. They make their living based on agencies trusting them. As an advertising collective, we have to do the same. Every time we partner with an agency, we consider ourselves as much a part of that agency as we do our own business. So if you are looking for freelancer-level trust with the backing of an agency-like business, reach out to us. We’ll move your business forward, and we’ll keep our lips sealed.